Grainhandling equipment rebuild

[villageblacksmith]

A customer brought two of these to the shop and asked me to "fix them". He supplied a length of the red "trough". I'm not sure what the official name of this part is. Here is a picture of the worn out part.
In this picture of the original part you can see the rusted out area. If you look close you can see the where I used a cutoff wheel to remove the bearing mounts. A two inch shaft passes through the part. One of the holes for the shaft is still visible and complete, and the other one has been somewhat rusted away. The only other original part I used was a curved flange with bolt holes that I removed from the end resting on the concrete.
This next photo shows the project well underway. You can see the new red trough and the original curved flange with the bolt holes welded to the end. On the end closest to the front of the welding table, which is where I was standing as I worked on this, you can see that most of the easy work is done, except for the welding. I have the new bottom flange tacked in, the end piece rolled and tacked in place, and the pieces for the compound curve on the table in front of the project. If you look on the right side by the wooden block, you can see the formed bearing mounting brackets that I will reuse.
At this point in the rebuild, I told my son that the next part of the job, building the compound curve part, is the real reason the project showed up at our doorstep. And I am sure that many of you that view this have better ways of going about it. This is just how I did it. We often don't have the advantage of being able to do a lot of the same stuff to where we can spend the time and money to get set up to " do it right ". Anyway, I cut the flat shapes you see in front of the red part on the cnc plasma table. And all the parts were cut from 11 gauge steel. I then rolled them on a 36" Pexto hand roller. After that I had to do some further trimming and fitting to get them to all behave. I tacked them in, and the welded them inside and outside
And a final view of one of the finished parts.
Maybe some who view this will be inspired to tackle a project that maybe looks difficult as a whole, but by breaking it down into a series of steps it becomes very doable.

[Bls repair]

Very nice

[whtbaron]

I think it's called a boot.... nice job. About the only way I can think of to make that out of one piece would be to use a power hammer and there are disadvantages to doing it that way as well. The more you stretch the metal, the thinner you make it, so while your repair might have more exposed welds, there's a chance it will last longer than what was there originally if they can keep the moisture out of it. Looks good to me.

[robson1015]

Well done

[mla2ofus]

And tell the customer to not leave grain in it if it will get wet. Rotten grain gets acidic.

[villageblacksmith]

And tell the customer to not leave grain in it if it will get wet. Rotten grain gets acidic.

Isn't that the truth!!
But, I realize that it's difficult, with as large as many farming operations are today, to always stay in top of things that aren't clamouring for attention.
And, thanks to all for the kind words for the project.

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[whtbaron]

And tell the customer to not leave grain in it if it will get wet. Rotten grain gets acidic.

I was thinking about that too... it really appears to be rusted out and not worn. It looks like the horizontal shaft pivots a chain/paddle conveyor laterally and it's unlikely the paddles can clear all of the grain out of the boot... there will always be a couple handfuls at the end of the drive that don't get cleaned out. Compounding that is that there is likely a hopper bin above it that feeds the conveyor. Even dry grain is usually somewhere between 8 and 18% moisture depending on the crop. That hopper bin will change temperatures faster than the grain (more-so with sunlight on it), so condensation forms on the bin walls and runs down into the bottom of the hopper, which drains into that boot with the two hand-fulls of grain in it. More permanent solutions might involve a screened drain below the boot (which will also leak small weed seeds and require cleaning) unless there is concrete in the way, or possibly a clean out hatch unless the bin above it stays full of grain. A layer of fiberglass or powder coating might prolong the agony, but then you'd lose a repeat customer.

[123weld]

could be rought on this one, but grain can be abrasive, escpecially "wheat". i used to haul/truck grain. i used to load outa a particular mill where they sucked grain/wheat outa train cars through a air veyor, that routed to and from silos. the sweeps/turns in the pipe used to wear out from the wheat. welders were constantly splicing in new sections/sweeps of pipe, where wheat ate it up.

[villageblacksmith]

A lot of people are unaware of just how abrasive grain can be. But, in all fairness, a lot of people in the world know very little about farming practices. At least in "these United States". Farmers in our area generally consider rice to be at the top of the list of abrasive grain.

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